Regret List

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The Regret List

Jessica Billings

Published by Jessica Billings at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Jessica Billings

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I think the worst emotions in the world are the ones
without opposites. I mean, sure, worry is bad, but eventually it’s
alleviated with relief. Same thing with sadness or anger.
Eventually you can be cheered up again. No, the bad ones are things
like guilt and embarrassment. Those are the ones without opposites,
the ones that stick with you. I still cringe when I think back to
my most embarrassing moments. Doesn’t everyone? But guilt, I think
that’s the worst. Because once you regret something, you dwell on
it. And once you dwell on something, there’s no reprieve. At least,
that’s the way it is for me.

My Top 5 Regrets:

1. Having no good memories of my dad
   

2. Agreeing to go out with Jason
   

3. Ignoring all the signs that something was really,
   really wrong
   

4. Destroying the most important thing I ever
   created
   

5. Pretty much the entirety of my ninth grade year
   

I’ll start with number 1. It’s as good a place to
start as any. Now, it’s not that my dad was a bad guy. I’m not
saying he was a good guy, but he wasn’t all bad. From the little
I’ve heard from my grandparents, he had his good moments and loved
me like crazy. I don’t know why I can’t remember any of that. I do
have early memories. I even have memories where my dad
should
be, like when we packed up one morning and moved
across the country with barely an hour’s notice. I can see us
putting boxes in the car, I remember climbing up on a pile of
left-behind chairs to scribble my name on the ceiling of my
suddenly empty room, and I can still hear the massive crash of the
chairs as they toppled and sent me flailing to the floor.

I know my dad was there and the one time I brought up
the incident, my mom swore he was the first one to find me sobbing
on the floor with a pencil still clutched in my hand, but I can’t
picture him. I can’t even remember a human-shaped blob where he
would have been, like how I sometimes remember people in my dreams.
It’s as if all my memories have carefully snipped him out, leaving
jagged gaps of time that I just can’t fill in. Well, I guess that’s
not totally true. The ones I really want to forget, the most recent
ones, are locked in my mind with an intense clarity. These memories
start in second grade and are filled with sadness - the kind of
sadness that grips at your throat and forces you to your knees if
you think about it too long.

So, I’ll start in second grade. That’s where my story
really begins. I was seven years old and living in the suburbs of
Chicago. This was the day my family really started to unravel,
although I didn’t know it yet. One Saturday morning I was lying in
bed, wearing my headphones and slowly turning the volume up louder
and louder. My parents were upset again. The commotion had woken me
up that morning, with my mom pounding on the bathroom door,
threatening to call 911 if my dad didn’t come out. I heard her
dialing the phone, but it was longer than three numbers, so I
slipped my headphones over my ears and closed my eyes to ride out
the storm.

Halfway through the second track, the headphones were
suddenly ripped off my head and I glared up at my mom. She was
standing there, wordlessly holding out my backpack and for a
moment, I almost laughed, ready to tell her that it was the
weekend, not a school day. But then I saw her expression and knew
it wasn’t a day for laughing. “Pack up. We’re leaving,” she
said.

This is where my memories start to get cut short. I
don’t remember the realization that we weren’t coming back, that
this wasn’t just a little day trip. We were moving to my
grandparents’ house in the high desert of Oregon: a remote little
town that was incredibly dry, dusty, and boring. We had vacationed
there before and I hated it. I remember my mom talking in a
fake-happy voice though, saying that she was so excited to live
closer to her parents, that she needed their support with all that
we were going through.

I didn’t really understand what we were going
through, though. I just knew my room was suddenly empty and I had
to make a mark somehow, to let people know that this was
my
room. That’s why I climbed up to the ceiling and wrote my name in
tiny letters, before the chairs slipped and I came tumbling down. I
know we had a long car trip after that with our most important
possessions packed in the car with us and barely enough room for me
to squeeze into the back seat.

I’ve seen pictures of some of the towns we passed
through, but I don’t remember any of it. I will say this, though –
in all the pictures of that trip, the scenery changes, but my
family looks exactly the same. My dad has these creepy, dead eyes
and no expression on his face, while my mom is wearing a
ridiculous, cheesy smile. I can’t see my expression in the
pictures. In every picture, I’m facing away from the camera,
looking back at where we came from.

My next memory is my first day of school in a weird
town, where none of the trees had leaves, only needles, and there
was an inescapable layer of dirt on absolutely everything. The
first few weeks, I took two or three showers every day, until I
gave up and realized I was fighting a losing battle. Only when I
accepted defeat did I begin to see the beauty of that strange
desert.

On my first day of second grade in a new school, I
was painfully desperate not to make any mistakes. I think that was
even more important than making friends. I just didn’t want to
stand out as a weirdo. That’s why, when we formed two lines to go
to the library, I quietly took my place near the back, hoping no
one would notice me. I stood behind one of the boys, a small
brown-haired, fierce looking kid who stood squarely in a way that
made up for his little height. I prayed no one would look at me or
pay me any attention, so my heart sank when he turned around and
gave me a withering look when I stepped in behind him.

“You’re in the boat’s line,” he said, his words
slurring together in a strange way that made him hard to
understand. I stared at him in confusion, looking around at the
other kids for help. But they all turned their backs, unwilling to
help the strange, angry boy and me, a skinny new girl in overalls
with red hair that stuck out at funny angles. “You’re in the boat’s
line!” he said again, gesturing around us.

I began to wonder what was taking the teacher so
long, why we hadn’t started moving. I stood on my tiptoes looking
for her, but saw she was chatting with one of the other teachers in
the hallway. I turned my attention back to the boy. “The boat’s
line?” I asked nervously.

His eyes narrowed and he turned away. “Never mind,”
he grumbled. It was then that I noticed the hearing aid nestled
behind his ear, partially hidden in his tousled hair. I recognized
it immediately; my grandpa wore one as well.

“Just ignore it,” my mom told me the first time I
asked what it was. “Your papa’s getting old and his ears don’t work
so well anymore. That little machine makes sounds louder so he can
hear them. It’s just like how you have to wear glasses to make your
eyes see better.” She tapped my glasses, pushing them back up on my
nose. Now that I could understand. I can still remember the
disbelief the first time I put on my glasses and could see my mom’s
face from ten feet away, her features no longer mashed up into a
blurry pale blob.

I wanted to understand this boy more than ever,
because I understood his embarrassment. I was so proud and excited
the first time I wore my glasses out in public. I could s
ee
,
I could read letters off the signs as we drove around, I could see
the expressions on people’s faces as they walked past. It wasn’t
until my mom took me to a church picnic that I realized my glasses
were not the desire of every small child who saw them. It was after
my mom left me with a group of other kids my age that it happened.
There was some caretaker there, being paid to look after us, but
she was probably only in her early teens and paying more attention
to a boy than us.

One of the bigger girls giggled when I walked up.
“Hey nerd,” she said. I didn’t get it and pushed my glasses up on
my nose, smiling at her in confusion. This only made her laugh
harder and gained her the attention of a couple other kids. She
reached out and snatched my glasses off my face. I had one of those
dorky bands around the back to keep me from losing them, which
caught on the back of my head and whipped my head forward, knocking
me off balance for a second.

“Hey!” I protested, grabbing for them. But she must
have been a couple years older, or absolutely enormous for her age,
because she held them out of reach. The other kids roared with
laughter as I leapt for them, tears building up in my eyes.

There were no clever insults, no blows exchanged, no
witty retorts. There was just me and a girl. Me, realizing that my
glasses were not such a precious gift – that it wasn’t a gift to be
different. And it wasn’t some sort of life-changing moment or
haunting reality, just a shift in my perception. The rest of the
story isn’t horrifying. The girl eventually tired of the game,
threw my glasses in the grass, and turned her attention to someone
else. I cleaned off my glasses and stuck them in my pocket and
started giving my mom a hard time every morning when she tried to
get me to put them on. Eventually, I stopped fighting her, stopped
taking them off when she wasn’t looking, and learned to accept it.
But that desire to be special, to be different, was gone. And
that’s why I wanted so badly to understand this boy, to relieve the
tension. Of course, back then I didn’t think of it in those words.
I just knew I wanted to be his friend.

I looked at the two lines as our teacher still
chatted in the hallway. A girl stood next to me, pointedly ignoring
my questioning look. I turned around. A boy stood behind me, making
faces at another girl in the line beside us. The boat’s line. The
boy’s line. I was in the boy’s line.

I tapped the irritated boy on the shoulder and waited
for him to turn around, still glaring. “Thanks,” I said,
sidestepping into the girl’s line. “I was in the boy’s line.” The
glare on his face faded instantly and he nodded. “What’s your
name?” I asked.

“Asher,” he said, looking irritated again. Except it
wasn’t irritation, I realize now. It was nervousness: the fear of
not being understood.

“Asher,” I replied. “I’m Paige.”

He gave me a funny look and formed his hands to look
like a book, then mimed turning a page. I giggled and nodded. Close
enough. As we finally started into the hallway, our teacher turned
to face us and held up two fingers in the shape of a V. I turned to
Asher again and gave him a quizzical look. He turned his hand into
a mouth. Blah blah blah, it yacked away, then he flashed it a V
with his other hand and it shut its mouth. I got it instantly and
mouthed a “thank you” to him. He brushed it away with a flip of the
hand.

But even all that – his willingness to help and my
determination to understand him – that was not how we became
friends. Trusted classmates maybe, but not friends. Or maybe we
were friends and I just didn’t realize it. Sure, I gave a silent
kick under the desk to the ones who giggled when he was called on
to answer a question, or a subtle shove to the ones who stuck their
tongues out at him when he was called away to speech therapy every
morning. But I would have done the same for any kid who was being
picked on and he never acknowledged my silent support, nor did I
expect him to. No, I don’t think we would have become real friends
if the accident hadn’t happened.

Can you call it an accident? It wasn’t a fall down
the stairs, a house fire, a mugging, nothing like that. But that
simple word that conjures up fear and an anxiety that tightens the
muscles of your stomach, it seems fitting in a way. No long
explanation needed, no wondering which words to choose, no
awkwardness. But I’m going to make you a promise now, one that I’m
going to keep the entire time I tell you this story. I promise to
tell you the truth of what happened, even if it’s harder, even if
it makes me look bad (which it will sometimes), even if I don’t
want to. So, this is what really happened: